<ol>
<li><p>If the genders work, I think SmartCookie and Bearcats should get married and procreate : ) They seem to be bas reliefs of one another. (Not to mention can you imagine the discussion around the dinner table, if someone isn’t smashing plates, that is.)</p></li>
<li><p>Tensighs, regarding your comment:
“There is nothing wrong with making money (all of us want to be financially stable!), but educating the less privileged (e.g., rural and urban youth) is not their high priority.”</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Without getting into a long and partisan diatribe about what the founding fathers actually meant by the constitution, or the fact that the entire country was founded as a rebellion against a “class structured” society, I will point out the most glaring and unavoidable fact in response to the arguments you present:</p>
<p>The United States lags behind a vast majority of the civilized world in terms of its education of its population. The students “going without” are not just the poor students. The middle class students in publicly funded institutions are going without because our citizenry seems to think it is the responsibility of SOMEONE ELSE to fund education.</p>
<p>If somehow this phenom is, as you say, what sets America apart, then I would argue that it is or will also be the thing that causes the continued decline and ultimate collapse of the American empire.</p>
<p>There is a big-picture pragmatist approach that needs to be addressed, and cannot be addressed under simple saws such as “We’re capitalists. That’s what makes America great.”
Eg., that’s only one piece of the puzzle.</p>
<p>If we’re trying to use the objective data to infer the quality of education, I think there’s something to be said for the non-magnet schools like IA.</p>
<p>For example, Hunter College HS had a mean CR 727 Math 716 last year. But then again they take only 10% of people who take the test…who first had to be in the top 10% of a standardized test. So if you have a school incorporating the other, what, 99% of the population, that has almost as good objective results, I could be convinced (after sitting in on some classes, maybe) that it’s just as good an education. </p>
<p>What I mean is–I’d like to see everyone take the SAT/ACT/some type of subject tests before 9th grade and then when they normally would. I bet half of kids at Hunter would’ve scored over 700 on SATs in 6th grade (one of my friends had a 2300 in 8th)! If the improvement is big enough, which I assume it is at something like IA since the average student doesn’t have those kind of scores, then I doubt the pace of the education makes the higher scorers/faster learners/whatever feel like it’s going too slowly.</p>
<p>kmccrindle, I do not agree with the notion that capitalism is what makes America great. However, there have been several structural legal and policy changes that have led to this educational inequality. If you want access to a decent education, you either have to live in the right zip code or fork out money to pay tuition at a competitive private school. A child has to have the right type of “hook” (which goes back to social, cultural, and human capital) to gain acceptance into selective colleges and universities. College tuition is rising faster than the rate of inflation. People are borrowing more money (in the form of loans) to attend college (in the past, grants and scholarships could meet the total cost of attendance). The current tax credits system benefits middle-class families rather than low-income families. People cannot discharge their loans in bankruptcy anymore. Education did not used to be like this 30 years ago. </p>
<p>The educational gap is widening, and it’s most prevalent along racial and class lines. I do not believe our founding fathers would have accepted this practice. However, someone (uber-elites, policymakers, etc.) is pushing these changes and enriching their bank accounts simultaneously. If some of them really cared about reforming American education, the situation would not be so drastic today. Remember, their kids will always have access to the best.</p>
<p>But I do not personally believe we are powerless in the face of the few who presently benefit from the status quo. I will add that collective individuals, irrespective of class, like the majority of Michigan residents today, who either buy into the “No new taxes” illusion (without recognizing that same is an erosion of infrastructure) or otherwise rise up over the merest suggestion of an actual tax increase (eg. graduated, for example), are presently contributing to the problem insofar as the erosion of adequate education funding accessible by all from early education through high school. In that regard, we as a society have to accept responsibility for the caliber of students, and yes, the have/have-not gap we are complicit in creating through a significant scarcity of basic resources.</p>
<p>Which is why I feel we’d be a more powerful and effective country if we could think outside the “self” box a little more and concern ourselves with quality education for “all” – accessible by all, and for the good of all. I am clear this is an uphill battle, and where there’s scarcity, there is always the tendency to look out for one’s own. </p>
<p>What all this has to do with International is that to me, International proves that you can create an environment that produces excellence and that – since it’s by lottery – is not strictly biologically or socioeconomically determined. Which is why International has, to my mind, earned its place in the rank.
I wish every kid had that chance.</p>
<p>As an IA Alumni, I have to say that KenLewis could have gone to IA…</p>
<p>Those are the same feelings that I felt at IA…from teachers to my peer group…I didn’t feel special for going to International Academy and I think I would have gotten into Michigan, even if I had attended Lahser (my home-school). The main things that helped me to be prepared for Michigan Engineering were robotics and the sciences, especially the IB credits.</p>
<p>I assume everyone who has posted agrees that the US News rankings on everything, but especially on high schools, are ludicrous. Unfortunately, they are also perverse and harmful, since many people nevertheless take them seriously, so that universities turn themselves upside down with pedagogically unsound, financially wasteful, and even unethical moves to raise their scores on the arbitrary and almost uniformly irrelevant ranking criteria in order to retain places, move up, avoid moving down, etc. (NW law is one of the worst on this score, and Duke law is offering money to law firms to hire and ‘pay’ its grads to keep its ‘employed at graduation’ rate up this year.)</p>
<p>The US News focus on per capita AP courses taken and “passed” is especially ludicrous, and not just because it focuses on AP rather than IB, or because different high schools offer very different numbers of AP courses to very different types of student bodies and vary on whether they focus (competitively) on students’ maxing the number of such courses they take. Pass rates on any test reflect the old GIGO computer programmer adage: garbage in, garbage out. Conversely, high quality intellect and motivated in, high results out. The bright students at any school will do well on the ‘objective’ tests, despite inferior curricula and spotty teaching. The same for the bright students at a very selective school, who thus (duh!) will have much higher pass rates and average scores–which proves absolutely nothing. In particular, it tells you nothing about the quality of the teaching at different schools, which is the real measure of a good high school (or university).</p>
<p>The same for how high-charged the curriculum may or may not be. The curriculum needs to be appropriate for the students in each school, and super-charging it for the uniformly bright at a very selective school–where regardless of the quality of the curriculum and the teaching, the students will do well on the ‘objective’ national exams–is much less difficult and impressive than constructing an effective curriculum and implementing good teaching at a school with a wide range of student talent and background. The super-charged curriculum at the selective schools will have marginal if any impact on their students’ objective test scores, compared to similarly bright students at schools with less advanced curricula, who in college will rapidly catch up and even surpass those from the more selective high schools.</p>
<p>My error on ‘AP versus IB’, obviously since International Academy is an all IB school. I just remembered from a quick skim of the USNWR site that it mentioned ratings based on average number of AP exams taken and scored at a certain level or higher.</p>
<p>My basic point remains: these rankings are meaningless, and using AP/IB or any other average test scores as a measure of high school quality is especially meaningless, for the reasons I stated. Those scores almost entirely reflect the quality of the students entering the high schools, rather than the quality of the teaching or the curriculum.</p>
<p>After reading through this thread (dated as it may be), if many of these posters are truly representative of graduates of their “elite” high schools…their alma maters should be embarrassed. There is a great differentiation between pride and arrogance, and many of them crossed that line a long time ago. The whole “mine’s bigger” argument makes all the “elite” graduates look pretty darn pathetic. Just the opinion of a lowly public school graduate.</p>
<p>I personally know a person who went to IA and is now at U of M. One of the most obnoxiously cocky people I have ever met, I swear… lol but I know not everyone there is like that</p>